Tag: Henrik Galeen

Two films by Henrik Galeen: Der Student von Prag (1926) and Alraune (1928)

This week, I reflect on two films by Henrik Galeen that have been released on a wonderful 2-disc DVD set by Edition Filmmuseum in Germany. I have been awaiting this set since it was announced nearly two years ago, so keenly pounced on it at the first opportunity. This pairing also makes a nice sequel to my last post on horror films inspired by German silent films – and Galeen’s script for Nosferatu (1922) in particular. So, in chronological order, let us begin…

Der Student von Prag (1926; Ger.; Henrik Galeen). Galeen’s film is a remake of the 1913 film, written and co-directed by Hanns Heinz Ewers and starring Paul Wegener as the titular student. I wrote about that version some time ago, and I was very curious to see how Galeen’s version differed from the original. The plot is essentially the same. The student Balduin (Conrad Veidt) is convinced by the devilish Scapinelli (Werner Krauss) to sell his reflection for enough gold and status to seduce the aristocrat Margit von Schwarzenberg (Agnes Esterhazy). Balduin attains wealth and success, much to the jealousy of the besotted flower girl Lyduschka (Elizza La Porta) and Margit’s fiancé Baron von Waldis (Ferdinand von Alten). Balduin’s success is dogged by his doppelganger, who fights and kills von Waldis in a duel and ruins his reputation. It all goes downhill from there, as the film’s opening shot of Balduin’s gravestone promised…

I’m afraid I found the first one hundred minutes of this film a slog to sit through. While the photography is exquisite, especially the gorgeous exterior landscapes, the drama moves exceedingly slowly. The lean, concise psychological drama of 1913 has become a rather baggy melodrama. The character of Lyduschka becomes a rather more sycophantic presence (but not a more sympathetic one), while the scenes between Balduin and Margit are more lengthily (but no more convincingly) elaborated. Furthermore, Galeen restages many of the same moments of the 1913 version: the meeting of Balduin and Scapinelli at the inn; the confrontation with his mirror image; the meeting at the Jewish cemetery; the duel fought by Balduin’s double. While the in-camera double exposures are as excellent as the 1913 version, none of them are as well staged or as dramatically effective. As I wrote in my piece on the earlier film, the long takes of the 1913 version give all the trickery an extraordinarily uncanny quality: the unreal seems to emerge directly from within the real. There is nothing as effective in the 1926 version.

What bothered me especially was the tone of Werner Krauss’s performance as Scapinelli. He seemed to be almost parodying his performance in Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari (1919). In Der Student von Prag, he out-hams anything Emil Jannings ever did. His eyes bulge, he puffs out his cheeks, he gurns and grimaces. It’s faintly creepy, but it’s so outrageously different from any other performance within the film that it’s simply not frightening. Even his beard looks exceedingly artificial, almost like it’s been painted on. Indeed, Krauss’s whole demeanour is extrovertly artificial. Why? He’s either been told by Galeen to clown about like this, or else Galeen has utterly failed to rein him in. Everyone else in Der Student von Prag performs their roles with a degree of dramatic realism. It’s a fantastical story, but the performances are realistic. All except Krauss. Fine, Scapinelli is a faintly otherworldly figure, but I can’t believe that his clownish appearance and mannerisms are the best choice to signify this. (Again, the performances are far more consistent in the cast of the 1913 version.)

Exacerbating this factor is Galeen’s editing. So oddly were some scenes put together that I wondered if I was watching a print reconstructed from different negatives (i.e. a blend of “home” and “export” versions). When Scapinelli first propositions Balduin at the inn, Galeen cuts between a front-on mid shot of the two men to a shot that is captured from a side-on angle (in fact, more than 90 degrees from the front-on shot). It’s a peculiar choice, and the cutting between oddly different angles here and elsewhere in the film is very striking. (It’s also something I observed in Alraune, per my comments below.) This isn’t an issue of continuity: I don’t care how a film is put together, so long as it is effective. It’s because Galeen’s editing often lessens the tension in a scene, even the tension created within a particular shot, by cutting to a mismatched alternate angle or distance. Why, Henrik, why? The film is full of brilliant images, but I’m simply not sure Galeen can quite mobilize them into a truly convincing sequence of images.

All of that said, the last half hour of Der Student von Prag is a knockout. Balduin, having lost everything, proceeds to a drinking den where he drinks, dances, and revels. The band wears weird clown make-up and grotesque masks and blindfolds, and the double-bass is being played with a saw. Clearly, something odd has the potential to break out, and break out it does. Balduin starts to become more and more manic, and the sequence around him likewise grows more and more manic. Handheld camerawork turns the crowded, shadowy interior into a stomach-churning blur. But Balduin hasn’t had enough by far. He starts conducting the dancers with a riding whip; then he starts smashing crockery, then fittings, then furniture… The sequence lasts nearly ten minutes, and it just keeps going. I’m not sure (per my above comments) that Galeen really puts the shots together in a way that builds a convincing montage, but the sheer length of the sequence has its own manic sense of energy: it just keeps going, its obsessive cheer becoming less and less amusing and more and more unsettling. Veidt’s performance, too, grows subtly more manic. His face has moved from resignation and grief to a kind of enforced, frenzied joy.

There follows a series of scenes in which Balduin races through the night, encountering Margit and then his doppelganger. What really makes the sequence work is the way the wind haunts both interior and exterior spaces: whipping the trees, the curtains, the clothing… It gives a marvellously unsettling, threatening sense to every scene. This is where everything in the film works. Scapinelli (thankfully) is simply forgotten from the narrative and Balduin is left alone to face the consequences of his actions. Galeen abandons location shooting in favour of studios, which gives all these final “exteriors” the aura of nightmarish interiors, half-empty spaces filled with shadows and shards of buildings. Everything is sinister, malevolent – and empty of everything but Balduin and his sinister double. The final scene before the mirror is fantastic, filled with striking images of the shattered glass, and Veidt’s performance is superbly convincing: mad, violent, and tender all at once.

This is a fine way to end the film, but my word the rest was a slog to sit through. Even though the 1913 version consists for the most part of long, unbroken takes for each scene, it manages to tell the entire story succinctly and swiftly in barely 80 minutes. The 1926 version (in this restoration) is over 130 minutes. That’s fifty extra minutes to tell the same story. As good as the finale is, I think that the 1913 version is a far superior film. (So too is the version directed by Arthur Robison in 1935, starring Anton Walbrook as the eponymous student.)

Alraune (1928; Ger.; Henrik Galeen). Having re-adapted Ewers’s Der Student von Prag, a year later Galeen embarked on another adaptation of this author’s work. Ewers’s novel Alraune (1911) was a huge hit and republished many times in the early twentieth century. It still retains something of a cultish reputation among certain circles. In the anglophone world, there are two English translations available. One was issued in the 1920s and presents a rather prudishly reduced/edited text. The other is a recent, self-published edition, that offers a “complete, uncensored” text – but alas sacrifices fluency in English for the sake of adherence to the original. (My references below to Ewers’s text are therefore sourced from the original German edition.)

Ewers’s novel remains an impressively nasty piece of work. The story concerns Jakob ten Brinken, a scientist who inseminates a prostitute with the seed of a hanged murderer in order to study the offspring. “Alraune” is a female mandrake, a horrific vision of modern womanhood: she drives men to their deaths with violent desire, until she discovers her true origins and kills herself.

The author of this spectacular tale was a renowned provocateur. In a career spanning literature, philosophy, propaganda, acting, filmmaking, and occultism, Ewers was also sexually and politically radical.  Homosexual, he was twice married; a supporter of Jewish enfranchisement, he embraced National Socialism. (Inevitably, his views and lifestyle led to a fall from grace under the Nazis.) Ewers’s literary avatar was Frank Braun, who appears in Alraune as a hotblooded student, arrogant and ironic, who urges his uncle to test the bounds of human power – and to challenge God. Braun had already appeared in Ewers’s novel Der Zauberlehrling (1909), in which he infiltrates and subverts a religious cult, and would reappear in Vampir (1921), which explores his moral and literal transformation into a vampire.

The male narrator of Alraune is an obtrusive, prurient presence in the text, lingering over his imagined muse as he writes. This muse morphs from a “blond little sister” into a “wild, sinful sister of my hot nights”, her “wild soul stretches forth, glad of all shame, full of all poison” (7). (And so on, and so on.) Returning perpetually to this fantasy, the narrator himself becomes vampiric, metaphorically drinking “the blood that flowed from your wounds at night, which I mixed with my red blood, this blood that was infected by the sinful poisons of the hot desert” (174). The violence of this fantasy grows across the book, fixating with gruesome glee upon the imagined sister’s body – “eternal sin” bidding him tear into “the sweet little child’s breasts, which had become the gigantic breasts of a murderous whore” (333). This imagery characterizes the book’s peculiarly salacious tone. (There are, by my count, no less than thirty references to women’s breasts – not to mention numerous depictions of physical and mental torture to animals and humans.) Just as the narrator desires the sister he imagines, so the scientist within the narrative succumbs to his desire for the mandrake he creates – and, as ten Brinken’s nephew, Braun’s desire for Alraune crosses from the familial to the sexual. But Alraune is also a satirical novel, the first half of which is a profoundly critical overview of bourgeois conservatism at the turn of the century. In a world of institutionalized hypocrisy, corruption, and vice, both Frank Braun and the narrator are perverse Nietzscheans, willing to overturn every norm.

For the film version of Alraune, Galeen wrote his own screenplay, retaining only the barebones of Ewers’s novel (the first half of which does not even feature the figure of Alraune). Professor ten Brinken (Paul Wegener) has created animal life artificially and plans to do the same with a human subject. Harvesting the seed of a hanged criminal (Georg John) to inseminate a prostitute (Mia Pankau), he raises the offspring as his daughter Alraune. Seventeen years later, Alraune (Brigitte Helm) runs away from her boarding school with Wölfchen (Wolfgang Zilzer). En route, she meets the magician Torelli (Louis Ralph) and joins his circus. Ten Brinken tracks her down and forces her to accompany him to southern Europe. Here, Alraune’s flirtation with a viscount (John Loder) makes ten Brinken jealous. Discovering her origins, Alraune sets out to destroy her “father” by feigning a seduction and then ruining him at a casino. She also enlists the help of ten Brinken’s nephew Frank Braun (Iván Petrovich), with whom she eventually elopes. Financially and morally exhausted, ten Briken collapses and dies.

Alraune was premiered in Berlin in February 1928 in a version that measured some 3340m; projected at 20fps, this amounted to over 145 minutes of screen time. When the film was distributed outside Germany, numerous changes began to reshape the film. In the UK, the film was released as A Daughter of Destiny and cut from 3340m to 2468m. Critics blamed the cuts and retitling for the disruptive sense of continuity of this version. (This did not stop it being a big hit.) In France, where the film was released as Mandragore in February 1929, censorship was likewise blamed for producing narrative unevenness. In Russia, Alraune was released only after Soviet censors removed all supernatural aspects of the storyline. (The copy of this version preserved in Gosfilmofond is 2560m.) Most severe of all was the board of censors in the Netherlands, where the film was banned outright from exhibition in January 1930.

This history is important to remember when examining the film on this new DVD edition. No copy of the original German version of Alraune survives. The restoration completed in 2021 by the Filmmuseum München relies on two foreign copies (from Denmark and Russia), using archival documents to restore the correct scene order and (where possible) the original intertitles. What it cannot restore is the original montage, from which 300m of material remains missing. Until 2021, the only copy readily available was an abridged version derived from a Danish print, to which a previous restoration inserted new titles translated into German. As well as missing and reordered scenes, the titles of this Danish version are both more numerous and more moralistic in tone than the German original (as restored in 2021). While the 2021 restoration offers a version of the film that is closer to the original, I am left wondering about how coherent the original actually was. As I wrote with the case of Gösta Berlings saga (1924), new restorations cannot help films with inherently confusing or incoherent narratives. You can make them resemble original texts as much as you like, but that won’t help if the original is itself uneven.

Seen in the beautifully tinted copy presented on the new DVD, Alraune is a splendidly mounted and photographed film. Galeen creates a pleasingly rich, louche world, complete with telling expressionist touches (especially ten Brinken’s home/laboratory). But some of the issues I had with the tone and editing of Galeen’s Der Student von Prag are also evident in Alraune. The cutting is sometimes rather odd, as though the montage has been reassembled from fragments. I am uncertain whether this is the fault of Galeen or of the pitfalls of lost/jumbled material inherent to the prints used for the new restoration.

For example, late in the film, when ten Brinken is alone in the hotel room (Alraune is meanwhile meeting Frank Braun) the film keeps cutting back and forth between close-up and medium-close-up shots of ten Brinken. At this point, the Danish print inserts the vision of Alraune transforming into the mandrake root seen at the start of the film. In the German version (as restored in 2021), the vision of the mandrake is moved to an entirely different scene at the end of the film – but the editing of the shots of ten Brinken becomes no more coherent. What kind of effect is being sought by the back-and-forth shots of ten Brinken? Is the slight change in shot scale meant to convey doubt, hesitancy? What kind of reaction are we meant to have? What is the significance of this choice (if, indeed, it is a choice, rather than a textual anomaly)? Why break up Wegener’s performance into oddly mismatched chunks? I can perfectly well understand why the Danish editors of 1928 choose to interpolate the vision of the mandrake here: they wished to make sense of this otherwise inexplicable sequence of cuts, to suggest what it is that ten Brinken is thinking. As restored in 2021, Galeen’s montage is such an odd, indecisive, unconvincing way of putting together the scene. Again I ask: why, Henrik, why?

If the editing is sometimes odd and might be blamed on the complex textual history of the film, other aspects are surely to do with narrative and narrational problems. Some of the most basic elements of the narrative are left weirdly open. Though the film abandons the fatalistic conclusion of Ewers’s novel, the happy ending of Alraune running away with Frank Braun is entirely unsatisfactory. I understand how and why Alraune wishes to leave ten Brinken – the film makes it clear that she finds his lies and manipulation abhorrent. But why does she elope with Frank? The film sidesteps Frank Braun’s complicitly in inspiring and realizing ten Brinken’s experiment to create Alraune in the opening scenes, just as it offers no clarity on how or why Alraune decides to contact him – nor on how and when she develops feelings for him.

Again, a comparison between the 2021 restoration and the earlier Danish copy is instructive. In the only scene of Alraune/Frank together, the Danish version inserts additional intertitles to try and clarify the narrative. In this version of the scene, Frank begins (in good expositional fashion) by saying that Alraune has summoned him via letter. Alraune then replies at length: “In read in my ‘father’s’ diary all that happened before my birth. Have pity on me… I am eager to know everything.” In the German version, Frank says nothing at all, while Alraune merely says “Thank you for coming.” The inserted text in the Danish version is a clunky attempt to clarify the narrative, which in the German original is almost inexplicable. How did Alraune even come to know of Frank’s life (or even existence), given that Frank has been travelling for the past seventeen(?) years? And why does she suddenly send him a letter to come to meet her in southern Europe? And where/when exactly did she write to him, or know where to write? Given the supposed romantic relationship that develops between the characters (again, hardly seen in the film), these are perfectly reasonable questions to ask.

The film also remains ambiguous about the reality of (and thus our potential attitude towards) ten Brinken’s tenebrous theory of heredity. In the final scene (as restored in 2021), ten Brinken suffers delusions in his last stages of mental and physical collapse. He finds and rips from the ground a piece of vegetation he thinks is another mandrake root. As he gazes at it this perfectly ordinary root, we see a vision of the mandrake from his old collection transforming into the person of Alraune. This is clearly a fantasy, totally at odds with what we have just seen on screen. Yet the final shot of Alraune shows the ordinary root clutched by the dead ten Brinken transforming into the mythical mandrake. After showing us the scientist’s deluded folly, the film suddenly tempts us with a final trick. Do we believe? Was Alraune really a spirit of malign femininity, or just an ordinary young woman? What does the film think, or ask us to think?

I seems to me that the film invites us to ask these narrative or cultural questions not by choice (I don’t think it makes an effort even to frame such questions) but by the nature of its loose coherence and narrative gaps. (The Danish version simply cuts this entire final sequence, as if the editors had no hope of making it coherent.) As I hope I have articulated here and in my comments on Der Student von Prag, I am unconvinced that Galeen quite has a coherent thesis to suggest, proffer, or invite examination thereof.

None of these issues should detract from the greatest feature of Alraune: Brigitte Helm. I never cease to be amazed, delighted, and enthralled by this astonishing performer. And despite the emphasis in popular and scholarly writing on Alraune being a horror film, I cannot help but feel that Helm plays this film as a sinister comedy of manners. Though her character grows enraged at her “father” and in one sequence approaches him with half a mind to attack him (her attempt ultimately stalls before being enacted), for the most part she is a half-detached, half-curious figure who outwits and (in all senses) outperforms her male peers. As Alraune encounters (and seduces) a series of men, we see amusement spread over her face as the men grow jealous and fight or become sullen and despair. Only with ten Brinken does she deliberately set out to destroy a man (and for good reason), but always she recognizes masculine weaknesses. Alraune has an uncanny ability to adapt and survive, to make intelligent decisions that triumph over male desires and instincts.

In one of the climactic scenes, Alraune pretends to seduce ten Brinken. She does so to unnerve him, to prove her superiority and his weakness, and thus (in the film’s slightly hazy dramatic logic) to make him liable to ruin himself on the gambling table. In the scene in their hotel suite, Alraune walks from ten Brinken to a chaise longue, where she bends provocatively over the cushioned expanse of silk. While Alraune’s forward posture emphasizes her cleavage, her face is all innocence: eyes wide, brows raised, then a flutter of her lashes. Here, as in her every interaction with men on screen, Helm’s performance is defined by playfulness. One marvels not only at the transparency of her every gesture, but also at the way such readability invites collusion with the viewer. This is a performance designed to make us enjoy the pleasure of her seduction, to enjoy watching feminine cunning triumph over masculine vanity. The controlling, stern, selfish ten Brinken – with his enormous physical bulk – is here slow, stumbling, hesitant. Laid resplendently on the chaise longue, Alraune motions him over to offer her a cigarette, then gently nudges his leg when he hesitates at her side. Languorously taking the cigarette, she raises herself to receive the light – only to lower herself slowly as it is offered. Drawing him down towards her, she smokes, pouts, and spreads her body invitingly. As ten Brinken struggles to control his desire and confusion, Alraune finally bursts into laughter. Through Helm’s extraordinary control of movement, gesture, and expression, this whole sequence teeters deliciously on the border of self-parody. Her climactic laugh is both a release of tension and an acknowledgement that such performative vamping – femininity itself – is always a game. If Alraune is dramatically uneven, it is given emotional direction by Helm; whatever the plot, we can follow her performance.

In summary, after watching these two new restorations of his work, I remained unconvinced that Galeen was a great director. I love many qualities in these films, and each is (in its own way) very memorable. But they are also overlong and dramatically/tonally inconsistent. I am open to the possibility that some of their problems (editing/montage) derive from textual confusion and restorative lacunae, but others (performance style, narrational clarity) seem to me the result of artistic choices. Veidt and Helm (and Wegener) are superb in their respective roles, and Helm in particular is reason enough to treasure much of Alraune. But I admit that I prefer other adaptations of these same stories. I have already stressed my preference for the 1913 version of Der Student von Prag, and I here add that I prefer Richard Oswald’s version of Alraune from 1930 – also starring Helm. The latter version is also somewhat ragged, but its raggedness lets in a degree of dreamlike atmosphere that Galeen’s lacks. Oswald’s film is weirder, nastier, more extreme. Ten Brinken is more monstrous, Alraune more frenzied – and more vulnerable. (For those wishing to hear more on both films, I advise eager readers to consult my own forthcoming book on Brigitte Helm. It may be a while before it reaches print, but I hope it will be worth the wait…)

Finally, I must praise the Edition Filmmuseum DVDs of the two Galeen films. As ever from this label, the films are impeccably presented and the accompanying liner notes (and bonus pdf book) are highly valuable. But could we please have the 1930 version of Alraune released on disc? And the 1935 version of Der Student von Prag too?

Yours optimistically,

Paul Cuff

References

Hanns Heinz Ewers, Alraune, die Geschichte eines lebenden Wesens (Munich: G. Müller, 1911).

The cinematic afterlives of Nosferatu

This week, I revisit some of the cinematic afterlives of Nosferatu – Eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922; Ger.; F.W. Murnau). After catching Robert Eggers’s remake of the film earlier this year, I discussed my thoughts on its relation to the silent original in a podcast with Jose Arroyo (freely available here). To prepare for this, I rewatched (and watched for the first time) several modern films that cite or rework Murnau’s original – and made notes on my thoughts as I went. As a kind of written addendum to the podcast, I have collated and attempted to polish these thoughts into what follows…

Nosferatu – Eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922; Ger.; F.W. Murnau). What can I say about this wonderfully strange and compelling film? Every image is perfectly composed, marvellously controlled. The world on screen, enriched by tinting, has marvellous texture and resonance. Nosferatu is a fantasy and a period piece, but both the fantasy and the period are rooted in real places – and, for me, its exteriors truly make the film. The town, the forest, the mountains, the castle, and the coast – these locations have such a sense of pastness, and such pictorial power, that they sink into your memory. No amount of parody or pastiche can lessen their value. So too with the performers. They are cinematic archetypes, enacting some kind ritual drama that future generations feel obliged to mimic. But the performances are also playful and delightful, even their most naïve gestures somehow innocent of cliché. There is more than a touch of camp about Max Schreck’s Nosferatu, but a camp that is always sinister. His sexual predation is not quite human; interpreting his desires and motives is like trying to understand the consciousness of an animal or an insect; those piercing eyes are bright with a life than cannot be fathomed. Murnau shapes Nosferatu’s otherworldliness through the darkness from which he emerges, the shadows he casts, the untenanted spaces he inhabits. The film plays with his ability to move across space and time: he walks with the ancient deliberation of an old aristocrat in one scene then scuttles at terrifying speed in another. The figure is allied with cinema’s own uncanniness, the medium enabling the monster: his carriage hurtling through a forest like a berserk toy, his erect body rising in magical defiance of gravity from his coffin. All this richness of image and gesture is enhanced by Hans Erdmann’s original score, best heard (I’ll have you know) via Gillian B. Anderson’s edition rather than the version released on various DVD/Blu-rays. (Anderson’s edition more closely replicates Erdmann’s original orchestration but remains, sadly, available only on a long out-of-print CD.) As it shifts from sequence to sequence, Erdmann’s music moves from the lyrical to the rustic and the elemental; it is charming, brooding, devastatingly simple. As its title states boldly at the outset, Nosferatu is a symphony of horror – a truly complete work of cinematic and musical art. As much as its images and ideas have been treated as a grab bag for future generations to ransack, it still holds an un-replicable splendour.

Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979; W. Ger./Fr.; Werner Herzog). The first full remake of Murnau’s film, and by far the best. Shot on location in the Netherlands and Czechoslovakia, Herzog has an unerring knack for the right places, filmed at the right time of day, captured in the right conditions. Always in his films, you can see that this is a director who has spent time walking. These aren’t pretty landscapes, touristic ones, places chosen second- or third-hand – they are fresh, harsh, rugged, sublime. There is also the sense that Herzog’s minimal budget and no-frills filmmaking benefits the atmosphere: it always feels like he has snuck into these spaces without asking permission. These are stolen images, not forged ones. The town, the coast, the mountains, the castle – all become otherworldly, other-timely. The camera seems to have found out odd corners of Europe where the past lives on, like finding patches of frost on a bright spring morning. The supernatural seems almost an extension of this natural world, the hypnotic slow-motion images of bats, the time-lapse photography of moving clouds, or the opening footage of mummified corpses fit perfectly into this world, this mood – all are implacably real and ungraspably strange. The cast, too, fits in with this mood – through costumes and setting and lighting, yes, but through performance. All is mood. This Nosferatu is ridden by angst, pain. Herzog often said that Klaus Kinski’s best performances came when he was exhausted to the point of collapse. The actor would rant and rage and scream and shout and threaten murder, and Herzog would wait until the storm ebbed – then he would roll the camera and shoot the scene. The result is an air of timeless exhaustion, of a pitiable figure advancing through centuries of fatigue. The slowness of Kinski’s gestures across the film are dreamlike, but then he moves with terrifying speed when his instincts are riled – as when he sees blood on Harker’s hand, or in his writhing death-throes, curling up like he’s a sheet of parchment caught in a flame. It’s a performance of amazing power that draws you in every time you watch it. Just as fine, perhaps finer still, is Isabelle Adjani. She is as otherworldly and magnetic as any of Herzog’s images, who indeed seems to have imbibed and embodied them. Her glance, her movement, her posture – what a sublime presence she is on screen. (Yes, I really do prefer Adjani to Greta Schröder in Murnau’s film.) Elsewhere, Herzog brings surprising depth and pathos to his characters. As Renfield, Roland Topor is oddly and touchingly gentle – a sad figure, a lonely man chasing someone to love him, or a child chasing a father. He is a world away from the comically sinister Alexander Granach as Knock in Murnau’s film (or the later scenery-chewing performances of subsequent versions). And I do love Bruno Ganz’s honest, harried Harker. He does not have the boyish innocence of Gustav von Wangenheim for Murnau, but I can believe him as a man who lives in this particular world, who loves his wife, who finds himself in thrall to the uncanny. His slow transformation into a vampire across the film is marvellous, and I have always loved his final scene. He has a marvellously comic flourish (getting the maid to sweep away the salt that keeps him magically penned in a corner of the living room), as though he were touched not merely by the spirit of Kinski but by the spirit of Max Schreck. Then Ganz takes on the faraway look of someone being drawn into another kind of life, or afterlife. The last image of him on horseback, riding across the wind-whipped sands, accompanied by the “Sanctus” from Gounod’s mass, is beautiful. This is a film of which I remain inordinately fond.

Vampires in Venice [aka Nosferatu in Venice] (1988; It.; Augusto Caminito/Klaus Kinski). Yes, dear reader, I even watched this – just for you. Frankly, it was hardly worth it for the few sentences I write here. Kinski has grown his hair, a caged lion with a rockstar mane. He wanders with glazed, angry boredom around Venice – in a Venice pretending vainly to be the past. Christopher Plummer tries to track him down in the present, encountering the vapid stock characters of post-synchronized Euro-horror. It’s a slovenly, sloppy film – salacious yet soporific. I drifted in and out of its louche, morbid pall of atmosphere. I remember the final images, which touch on the poetic – yet somehow remain earthbound. Kinski, a naked woman in his arms, walking across a deserted square in the fog. Where was the film that justified such an image? Murnau is dead, and director Caminito (and Kinski, his eminence grise) did not wander into the past to find him, or to resurrect anything of his world.

Shadow of the Vampire (2000; US/UK/Lu.; E. Elias Merhige). A film about the shooting of Murnau’s film, the concept of which is that the director hired a real vampire for the role of Nosferatu. What a curious thing this is. The concept is neat enough, but it is framed in such odd terms – at least, from a film historian’s perspective. We are told (via an intertitle, no less) that Murnau creates “the most realistic vampire film ever made” – and the character later explains that realism is the essence of cinema. For the film, this is fine, but I wonder if this is how the writer and director of Shadow of the Vampire really felt about Murnau. Does anyone associate Murnau with “realism”, let alone define him by this term? I ask, because in all other senses Shadow of the Vampire is oddly loyal to Murnau – recreating with rather charming precision many of his original shots. We see the camera’s eye view of scenes, though these shots mimic the worn monochrome quality of old celluloid. Yet the film also shows us Schreck watching some of the landscapes from Nosferatu projected on a screen – but instead of pristine rushes, we get the battered and blasted tones of a grotty 16mm print. Amid the attention to period detail, this one glimpse of Murnau’s original footage is distinctly unflattering. John Malkovich is (inevitably) a weirdly compelling Murnau, obsessive and cunning but often charming. Willem Dafoe has a twinkle in his eye as Max Schreck, knowing that it’s all a game – even if the film takes itself a little too seriously. Indeed, my reservations about Shadow of the Vampire all stem from the way it addresses its own premise. The film gestures towards an ideology or aesthetic of realism but never develops it, nor does it allow the horror to grow frightening enough to compensate. Shadow of the Vampire is not a comedy, but the comedic shadows its every move. Dafoe, I think, knows always the dramatic limitations of these projects. He is never parodic in drama, but he can tread the line wonderfully well, as he does in Eggers’s Nosferatu. Shadow of the Vampire is interesting enough as an idea, and as a curious period drama, but I’m not sure it is anything more than a superficial engagement with the cinematic past.

Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002; Can.; Guy Maddin). I sometimes get asked what I think of Guy Maddin, or else people assume that I am interested in his “new” silent films. I confess that I have never taken much interest in them at all, nor have I ever felt strong kinship or interest in any “new” silent productions. I was once in Paris at the time of a retrospective and caught Maddin in person, introducing Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988). It remains the only film of his I have seen in the cinema, and I confess I found it interminable. Maddin certainly captures the stultifying awkwardness of certain early sound productions, but it felt like a short film blown out to feature proportions and even at 70 minutes it was a slog to sit through. His Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary is a much more lavish affair, taking its cue from innumerable previous iterations of the vampire myth – but shot silently and synchronized to a music soundtrack. In many ways, it’s a superb production. Maddin lights and shoots his scenes with stylish brilliance. His staging and choreography are striking, just as his mobile camera and his editing are dashing and spirited. But I regret how the many parodic performances and gestures it makes (not to mention the garish yellow text for the intertitles that sits superimposed over monochrome imagery) keep me at a distance. Campness need not be so superficial nor so silly as it is here, and these qualities make its aesthetic sumptuousness seem no more than surface and gesture. It has the trappings of silence but not of its depth or uncanniness. It’s a filmed ballet, but one without any frisson of liveness or great physicality. Rather, it’s a danced film – and I swiftly bored of its pretty artifices. Maddin’s film is only a very distant relation to Murnau, and despite its beautiful (sometimes ravishing) moments it has no resonance.

Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (2023; US; David Lee Fisher). You may not have noticed the release of this film, but I did – and its very existence requires some contextual explanation. Fisher’s only other film is The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (2005), a remake of Robert Wiene’s silent original. Using digital scans of the original film, Fisher recreates (not quite shot-for-shot) the aesthetic with a new cast – and dialogue. I had the peculiar privilege of encountering this film for the first time on a big screen with a class of film history students, after having watched Wiene’s original the previous week. I am always very sensitive to the mood of a room, especially of students – I do so want them to engage with (if not love) the films they are shown. There was nothing worse as a lecturer to feel that you were showing students something they actively hated (and I could always feel it in the room). But Fisher’s Caligari was the first time I felt glad to sense that the room had turned against a film. As bad a habit as it is for a critic to feel superior to a film, it is a worse habit for the director of a remake to feel equal to the original. The digital process of copy-and-pasting sets is neat enough, but the film has no idea how to replicate the sense of presence: Fisher’s cast are walking about mostly in green screen spaces, utterly divorced from their surroundings. It has the trappings of a period piece, but neither costumes nor faces nor performances can convince they have anything to do with the period. The dialogue is absurd, banal to the point of existential embarrassment. (How can such a script be thought adequate?) And when Fisher recreates the famous close-up of Conrad Veidt’s Caligari opening his eyes, the void between past and present is at its most unbridgeable, the gulf in intensity of drama and performance most apparent. (It is the same problem that Scorsese had in including this same shot of Veidt in Hugo (2011): it has infinitely more power and presence than anything in the surrounding film.)

So to Fisher’s second film… Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror was, so the internet tells me, funded via a Kickstarter campaign way back in the 2010s. The film was purportedly shot in 2015-16, which seems remarkable given that it took another seven years to get released. Of course, it has been released only for streaming via Amazon Prime, which I suppose is the equivalent nowadays of what was once called “straight to video”. As with Fisher’s Caligari, original images from Murnau’s film have been digitally transplanted around a new cast. The effect is both more detailed and somehow more disappointing. In Fisher’s Caligari, the sets are at least flat in the original. In Nosferatu, an entire world is reprocessed in a manner that I found positively sickly. I earlier described the richness of the locations being one of the chief pleasures of Murnau’s film, and their systematic eradication was one of the chief disappointments of Fisher’s film. The landscapes are CGI creations, imaginatively stunted – as is every interior space, every shot in fact. The backdrop to every scene resembles a generic screensaver, without a trace of weight or reality or mystery. (The costumes are no less convincing, nor even the occasional moustache.) Among the cast, I single out Sarah Carter as the only figure to have genuine emotional depth – or any kind of convincing presence. She stands in a different league to anyone else on screen, even Doug Jones, whose Orlok is at least a committed performance. But it, like everything else in the film, is an exhausted stereotype of something we’ve seen dozens of times before. Fisher’s technology has improved, but he still cannot write dialogue or assemble convincing faces or performances. In comparison, Maddin’s Dracula (for all my reservations) is an infinitely more convincing use of a silent milieu.

Nosferatu (2024; US; Robert Eggers). All of which brings us to Eggers. Oh, Eggers… I have only seen one of his other films, and I thought The Lighthouse (2019) was as dramatically hollow as it was stylistically skilled. The tone of the script and performances rubbed me the wrong way. Was this a parody that took itself far too seriously, or a serious drama that was incredibly flippant? Much as I admired the way it looked, I squirmed with embarrassment and irritation at the dramatic tone. Some of my reservations about The Lighthouse I also have about Nosferatu, but I enjoyed the latter much more.

For a start, it looks lavish, and Eggers knows how to dress a set and provide a beautiful background. There are images that evoke Caspar David Friedrich (almost more so than evocations of Murnau), and there are glimpses of some fabulous locations (in the Czech Republic). The whole section in which Hutter travels to the east is the best in the film, and I wish I had seen more of the amazing churches and villages glimpsed all-too-briefly here.

But the richness of this part of the film’s world, so breezily skipped through, makes the inadequacies of the Wisburg setting more apparent. The exterior spaces of Wisburg consist of little more than two streets and a very small crowd of inhabitants. There is no sense of place and time here, nor of the scale of the invasion of the rats and the accompanying plague. (Compare this to Herzog’s film to see how much difference this space makes in dramatic tone and mood.) And while I loved some of the scenes set on the coast, you never get the sense that Eggers quite knows how to let these images sink in or resonate. They are very pretty, but they have no greater purpose. Eggers can dress a world impeccably, but a world is also people and ideas – these take work of a subtler and more difficult kind. As with The Lighthouse, to me Nosferatu was a very modern set of people dressing up and playing the past. The very impeccability of the images made the dialogue and the tone of many performances incongruous. While the film is happy to employ religion and supernaturalism, no-one seems to believe in any kind of corresponding or supporting ideology. And while the film offers a token critique of (male) medical authority, it is also entirely predicated on the idea of female desire as hysterical and “other”. (Nosferatu is explicitly summoned, if not created, by Ellen.) What, if anything, does this film believe, or want us to believe, about the drama it shows?

The performances are a curious mix. I must begin by praising Nicholas Hoult, who as Thomas Hutter is the emotional heart of Nosferatu. I was moved by him as by nothing else in the film. When he says he loves Ellen, you truly believe it – a conviction without which the film would fall down. Hoult was absolutely the best thing in Nosferatu, the least histrionic and the most believable. Bill Skarsgård’s Nosferatu is very… well, loud. His abstract presence is first signalled by a vast roar of sound in the film’s prologue that had me covering my ears. And when we meet him and he speaks, his voice (featuring rrrs that roll like no other), even in a whisper, reverberates throughout the speakers and floor of the cinema. Utterly unlike the silent and unknowable figure of Murnau’s film, this Nosferatu is a physical, corporeal, rotting being, defined as much by sound as image.

As Ellen, I found Lily-Rose Depp oddly unsatisfying. She gets to romp and roar and moan and writhe, and does so with aplomb. (Many of her poses are supposedly based on historical accounts of madness/hysteria, but I felt I had seen young women writhe and vomit blood this way a thousand times before in horror films.) But when she must deliver the (vaguely) period dialogue, it carries the whiff of parody. In part, it is the script’s fault for attempting (and, I think, failing) to mimic nineteenth-century turns of phrase, but mainly it is an issue of tone. I remain unconvinced that Eggers knows how to handle (or to decide upon) a consistent or convincing tone. Depp was one of the main reasons I felt this Nosferatu was playing dress-up. Again, I do not blame the performer so much as the director. This too is the case with Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s performance as Harding, which I found inexplicably bad. How can an English actor speak English so unconvincingly? I do not blame Taylor-Johnson, for he’s clearly been asked to perform like this by the director. But why? Why is he so artificial, so mannered, so parodically out of place? I am at a loss as to how I am supposed to feel towards Harding or his family. His children are ghastly screaming creatures, mobilized by the film (so I thought while watching the first half) to make us glad of their eventual demise – but when the demise came, suddenly the tone suggested they had earned our sympathy, as had Harding. Why? How? When? As for Simon McBurney’s Knock, he is as scenery-chewing as they come, gnawing on live animals and shouting – always shouting. While the characterization might echo Murnau’s version, it brings nothing new (other than fatuous gore). Just think how tender Herzog’s Renfield is by comparison, a character who is more than one-dimensional – and whose madness is a blissfully quiet delight.

What of Eggers’s relationship to Murnau? I noticed how the new film’s credits never mention Murnau, only Henrik Galeen, the screenwriter of the 1922 film. How odd, and how ungenerous, given the direct citation of the film’s (i.e. Murnau’s) imagery as well as its characters. Yet I never quite got the sense that film history truly informed this film. Eggers has surely seen Carl-Th. Dryer’s Vampyr (1932) – the floating shadows, the uncertainty of space, the dislocation of sound and image – but his Nosferatu has nothing uncanny about it. Dryer makes his sounds teeter on silence, slip back into it, emerge unsettlingly from it; Eggers makes his film quite unbelievably loud, roaring, throbbing – even his vampire’s whispers are rendered at the volume of earthquakes. Nor did I get a sense of other Galeen films lurking in the background of Eggers’s. Perhaps this new Nosferatu has some faint echo of Galeen’s Alraune (1928), but only in the sense that both films have an interest in female sexuality and the uncanny. (And let me be absolutely clear: Lily-Rose Depp is no Brigitte Helm.) But I found no echo of the world of Galeen’s Der Student von Prag (1926), which has its own rich cultural history, being itself a remake of the (to my mind) superior version of 1913 (a film I discussed here). This is a whole strain of German cinema that I feel very little evidence of in Eggers’s film. On its own terms, this new Nosferatu is a perfectly enjoyable film – but it is a bold move to identify itself with the silent past. If nothing else, it invites comparison where otherwise it might not. Having summoned the comparison, I cannot but think that Murnau’s film is an eternally peculiar and resonant work whose secrets elude Eggers.

In summary… well, what is my summation? I set out on this little crash course through the afterlives of Nosferatu with the aim of suggesting how and where Murnau’s film inspired future generations. In the end, I fear that all I’ve done is complain. If this does not make for a neutral survey, at least it’s an honest assessment of what I felt. The more remakes, revisits, or (god help us) “reimaginings” of a film, the wearier I grow. There is something in the metaphor of the vampire, in its unkillable afterlife, that fits the ceaseless round of resurrections cinema has performed on Nosferatu. But having rewatched all these films, I feel I am become Kinski’s incarnation – eternally weary, wishing for the end of this eternal round. Let me return to my silent realm.

Paul Cuff